This is the very first Newbery Award winner. Oh, my goodness. That's the best way to describe it. For one thing, it is a history book written mostly during and briefly after WWI. The author describes the cause of the war as machines taking over people. He also praises Karl Marx's manifesto and mentions how the only bad part was a call to violent overthrow of governments but that that was never the outcome. He doesn't focus much on the Russian Revolution that broke out during the middle of the war. Van Loon definitely praises the USA as the paradise of the civilized world, but I also think he is a socialist. There are parts of the book that are interesting and there are parts that drag on. The Author even recognizes this and admits it in one of his latest chapters. I did get some interesting ideas from the book, but I finished it because it's on my list of books to read.

Also, he calls it a world history - not just a European History. He completely neglects the rise of Chinese civilization, Southern African civilization and Native American civilization. He mentions the rise of Indian civilization in about 2 sentences. In reading this book I felt he really believed in a superior race, (white European), like many other people of that age, and didn't even realize it himself.